Top BP exec said to slam company

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A top BP executive and possible successor to John Browne sharply critiqued the company's cost-cutting efforts, leadership style and political lobbying, according to a report Monday.

"The mantra of 'more for less' says we can get 100 percent of the task completed with 90 percent of the resources; which in some cases is OK but it needs to be deployed with great wisdom and judgment," Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive for exploration and production, wrote on the company's internal Web site, the Financial Times reported. "When it isn't, you run into trouble."

Under Browne, who retires in 2008, BP (Charts) has been praised as having some of the best management in the world.

But the oil major has also suffered a series of setbacks, including a deadly explosion at a Texas refinery that investigators said could have been prevented and the closure of half its massive Alaska oil field due to corroding pipes.

"The front line operations teams, I think, have lived too long in the world of making due and patching up this quarter for the next quarter, rather than really thinking about how we are going to maintain a piece of equipment for the next 30 or 40 years," the article quoted Hayward saying.

The shutdown in Alaska hit not only BP's profit, but also that of its partners in the field, ExxonMobil (Charts) and ConocoPhillips (Charts).

Hayward said BP's current leadership is too authoritative.

"We have a leadership style that is probably too directive and doesn't listen sufficiently well. The top of the organization doesn't listen hard enough to what the bottom of the organization is saying," Hayward wrote, according to the Times.

He also criticized the company for not cultivating strong political relationships in some places it does business, notably the United States.

"We need to be part and parcel of the society in which we operate," he was quoted as saying. "When bad times came, there weren't too many people standing around defending us or trying to help us through tough times."

The letter was seen as a way of distancing Hayward from Browne as the company searches for a new leader, the Times said, and was posted under the heading "Hayward shares candid views on 2006."

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